With your wonderfully ignorant slur against me, what exactly gives you any impression that I am a bigot because I called Cesar Chavez the Marxist that he was ? I didn’t know that calling a person a communist was a form of bigotry. You truly are a moron sometimes.

At least I can call you a moron without delving into making incorrect or unfounded assumptions about your character.

Ok, guys, clean up both of your tongues. Do either of you remember “Harvest of Shame,” the documentary on television in the very early ’60s that first introduced urban America to the conditions under which its food was being produced? Do either of you remember the migrant shacks in Marana and Picacho where human beings were forced to live as they picked for less than 60 cents an hour? Did either of you ever do backbreaking physical labor under crop dusters breathing poison on you? Those conditions led Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and others to their life long fight for justice. Not something that seems Communist to me.
I still remember the cotton farmer from Yuma dressed in his fine suede jacket with his elegant onyx cigarette holder who opposed the offering of course work to minorities in the community colleges in the ’70s because “if they were all educated no one would want to work in the fields.” He was a member of AZ Western’s governing board.
Without union strength, conditions never improve.

I don’t remember those things – then again I wasn’t even born until the late 70’s, so I probably wouldn’t. But I do know that labor conditions in the United States have not always been as good as they are today. I also know that labor conditions in various parts of the world today might be just as bad as some of the worst times in US history.

So, I am not at all opposed to unions. I think that the right to assemble absolutely includes the right to unionize & I feel that unions historically have done many, many good things. Among these good things could be changing some of the circumstances that you mentioned. We should all be grateful for those who came before us & sacrificed to make our lives better.

I also feel that one of the biggest problems with Communist China today is that workers cannot really unionize. The Chinese Communists have used this ban on unionization as a way to ensure their overall victory in the “Race to the Bottom”. They have a nearly unlimited supply of labor & they can afford to pay each worker less & less each day. Organized labor in Communist China could go a long way in bettering the lives of people there & in helping grant the Chinese people other freedoms that their repressive & authoritarian government denies them.

So, I am not opposed to organized labor at all. But I am definitely opposed to some of the tactics employed by various organized labor groups. Some of the brutal & thuggish tactics that various unions have been known to use towards those who have opposed them are utterly unacceptable. Employers should never use such tactics & neither should workers or unions.

I also believe that just like people should have the right to unionize, people ought to have the right not to join unions & still work at their employers’ prerogative. The right to peaceably assemble does not require anybody to assemble if they don’t want to just like freedom of religion does not require anybody to attend any church at all.

So, even though I oppose many of the political views that he espoused & some of the methods that he used, one thing that I will grant in regard to Cesar Chavez was that in the end his overall methods were effective.